THE BACKSTORY:

Claire Robertson on writing The Spiral House (Umuzi, R180) What came first with The Spiral House was learning that in the late 1950s, a score or more Americans travelled from Cape Town to Cairo in a caravan of Airstream trailers. They must have passed by the farm that holds a magical place in my family’s founding saga, which hooked my attention. Getting from there to an exploration of the weird science of the Enlightenment and the art of wig-making as told by a freed slave girl on an estate in the Cape in 1794 was a process, if that is not too concrete a word, of being led by the characters.

Next there came a gentleman farmer, frustrated to the point of tears with the South Africa he finds himself in, in the far northern Transvaal in 1961. He loves an impossible woman — but all women are impossible to him. His life has taken a turn towards solitude and here he is, on an island of rationality amid folk who are not his own, frozen as he watches a tall, clear-eyed nun perform an act of immense courage in leaving her convent. He, the lad Jacob Kobe and Sister Vergilius form a sort of splintered family into which there comes an American, travelling as part of the caravan and stopping long enough to act as a catalyst in their lives.

In 1794, on the slave estate Vogelzang in the Cape, the girl Katrijn van der Caab has no such help. She has been brought to logic and literacy by her mentor, the wigmaker Le Voir, to whom she is apprenticed, but when it comes to the act of rescue and the escape to sanity she must perform, she has to find strength in her own instincts.

Vergilius and Jacob echo in Katrijn, she in them; the farm Bandolier in 1961 is in the sway of — when it is not defining itself in opposition to — the humours that shape the farm Vogelzang in 1794.

In all the trial, error and experimentation of the writing of The Spiral House, the part I was most conscious of was the obligation to follow through and tell as much of their story as I could, as honestly as possible. I had a terrible vision of characters abandoned only half-formed, and I was roundly skrikked into making sure that did not happen here. — Interviewed by Jennifer Platt